In most cases, the increasing age is not really a cause for concern. The majority of these older dads don’t have fertility problems, and father babies without serious physical or developmental problems, says Robert E. Brannigan, M.D., a urologist and specialist in male reproductive medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

But that doesn’t mean delaying fatherhood is risk-free.

Aging Means Problems On Your Sperm Production Line
Women are born with all the eggs they’ll ever need. Men, on the other hand, are literal sperm factories.

You make about 1,000 swimmers every time your heart beats, says University of Washington endocrinologist Bradley Anawalt, M.D., a spokesperson for the Endocrine Society.

Most never fertilize an egg—they’re either released through ejaculation or broken down by the body once they’re past their prime.

But after you hit about age 30, some of your machinery starts to misfire, says Ranjith Ramasamy, M.D., director of male reproductive medicine and surgery at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

You can blame exposure to things like radiation, environmental toxins, and plain old aging.

In a Baylor College of Medicine review, the researchers crunched the numbers on 86 congenital problems linked to older fatherhood.

They concluded that the risk of having any of these issues increased from 1 in 50 among the general population to 1 in 42 among babies born to men age 40 and older.

Specifically, the risk of having a child with achondroplasia—a type of dwarfism—spikes from 1 in 15,000 to 1 in 1,923 once men reach age 50. And the risk of schizophrenia more than quadrupled, from 1 in 100 within the general population to 1 in 22 with fathers over 50.

What’s more, autism rates rise from 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 174 for kids whose dads had them after age 40.

Unfortunately, cancer rates among offspring also seem to rise too as their dads grow older, possibly because of some of the same DNA mutations that contribute to other conditions.

That means doctors who advise men about their reproductive health don’t have a standard age at which they raise red flags about these risks. What’s more, there’s no single test to assess the risk of having a child with these conditions.

Currently, doctors can screen your sperm for DNA mutations. But they must destroy them to do so, so you wouldn’t have any assurances that those results would match up with the next batch you produced, Dr. Ramasamy says.

And concerned couples can also go the in vitro fertilization (IVF) route, and use a technique called preimplantation genetic diagnosis, which tests each embryo for genetic diseases before it’s implanted into the woman’s womb.

But Dr. Ramasamy predicts that within the next five to 10 years, there will be a genetic test that can tell you if your sperm’s likely to cause problems.

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